Devolver Digital has published a new documentary on Steam called Surviving Indie. The idea of the documentary is to bring more attention to the struggle of being an independent game maker. In some ways, it feels like it might be a response to Indie Game: The Movie, which has been criticized by some
Before I had even watched Groundhog Day (1993), my childhood was fringed with the fantasy of alternate experiences of time due to a British children’s TV series called Bernard’s Watch (1995-2005). Bernard, the lucky bugger, had a stopwatch that could freeze time. Each episode he’d perform this mirac
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Broken Breakout? (Browser, Windows, Mac) By Tim Garbos One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. That’s how the old adage goes. But can it be applied to videogames? Tim Garbos seems to
Nina Freeman has announced that her next game, called Kimmy, will be out on January 6th 2017. It will be part of the Humble Monthly Bundle and so the price of the subscription you’ll get Kimmy and some other games. That’s something to look forward to in the new year, then. As Freeman revealed to us
Antioch: Scarlet Bay looks like it’s set to take storytelling in videogames in a worthwhile direction. Out on April 6th 2017 for iOS and Android, it’s an adventure game set in the titular dark metropolis where you play as a detective investigating a homicide. That’s not the cool bit. It’s the fact t
Lara Croft GO came out for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita on December 3rd this year and brought with it a time-exclusive set of levels. Called “Mirror of Spirits,” these levels take the grid-based puzzles of the game’s dioramas in a radically new direction than the main levels and the first expa
Videogames about the drudgery of working in a dead-end job, pushing piles of paper off a desk, are as old as, well … almost as old as videogames. One of the first was probably Takeshi no Chōsenjō, the 1986 game directed by Takeshi Kitano (known for the game show Takeshi’s Castle as well as starring
I missed the latest game by Brendon Chung (creator of Thirty Flights of Loving, Quadrilateral Cowboy) when he released it last month, but it’s certainly worth highlighting. Called Acre 6, it’s a deconstruction of the classic RPG, full of jest, made for the Procedural Generation Jam. It starts you ou
One of the most important games in the world (and don’t you forget it) Neko Atsume, the cat-collecting game, got an update last week. As you’d expect for this time of year, the update sees the return of the snow music as well as Christmas decorations to spotted around some of the scenes. There are a
We have got to talk about the gun in Sundered. I know—a gun? Videogames have a lot of guns so what can possibly make this one special? Well, it’s large. (Uh huh.) It fires a huge laser ball. (Uh huh.) And it knocks you flying backwards. (Right.) Look, you didn’t have the shock I did when I first pre
Red Hook Studios announced back in October that Darkest Dungeon, its dungeon crawler about the psychological stresses of adventuring, would be getting DLC in early 2017 called “The Crimson Court.” Today, we’re able to bring you the first reveal of that DLC with the introduction of a new character ca
It’s cold. You burrow further into your scarf, hoping to shield more of your face from the harsh winds biting at your cheeks. The streetlights do little in their attempt to guide you along the cobblestone street—the fog is too thick to distinguish shapes. As you walk, you squint against the way the
It is the end of the year but not the end of times. This means that our minds are being coaxed to look beyond the little that is left of 2016 and towards 2017. What is there for us in this future year? According to the 1987 Schwarznegger film The Running Man, a dystopia is what awaits us, spearheade
Around this time of year you can expect a number of things to definitely happen. One of those is that a bunch of shallow Christmas-themed games will turn up, hoping to feed on your festive spirit to turn a profit. Perhaps that’s mean spirited, cynical even, but hey, it’s true. In any case, it’s this
The Sokpop Collective, a group of four like-minded Dutch game makers, is releasing the Bamboo EP today. The obvious question for me to ask was: why bamboo? “Bamboo is strong, yet flexible and makes an amazing sound,” I’m told. “On top of that, bamboo makes for a good aesthetic. It’s such a unique pl
Much of the public was left stunned in the wake of the November election in America. Beyond Clinton’s loss, despite winning the popular vote, many were shocked that the margin was close at all. While distrust and dislike of the electoral college is a fairly bipartisan issue, it is actually only one
Sign up to receive each week’s Playlist e-mail here! Also check out our full, interactive Playlist section. Walkie Talkie (Windows) BY DANIEL LINSSEN Daniel Linssen must see platformers everywhere. He’s already made one inside a computer interface and one that works in tandem with a separate game. N
That gruff throat noise is unmistakable. If you’re familiar with Sikth, the British progressive metal band, you should recognize the distinctive low tones of vocalist Mikee Goodman‘s voice in the new teaser trailer for No Truce With the Furies. Goodman is an unexpected choice to contribute a voiceov
Forget about Moblets, that cute-as-heck game we spotted earlier this year. It’s no longer called that. It’s new name is Ooblets. And to reflect that title change, the world it’s set in is now called “Oob.” So yes, it’s still goddamn adorable, even more so these days. That isn’t all that is new. As O
I have bizarrely fond memories of playing around with Bokida when it was first released back in 2013. Bizarre because, at the time, the game was only a limited prototype. But there was something about its openness and the toy-like expressions its world allowed. It gave you a vast white landscape wit
How real are our memories? Many of Japanese author Haruki Murakami’s works meditate on this question. We remember the past a certain way, but are those memories true to life? His novels and short stories muse on memory, time, love, and human isolation, with characters put in strange settings that ar
State of Play is known for creating videogames out of physical materials. Their biggest to date is Lumino City (2014), an adventure game set across a mechanical metropolis that the team actually constructed out of paper, card, wood, miniature lights, and motors. Outside of that are smaller titles li
Vancouver-based artist ceMelusine has been working on the East Van EP for the past couple of years. It’s a collection of four games that ceMelusine has been steadily working on in order to grow as a game maker. The effort goes towards trying to make games more like music by packaging them in a simil
The pixel artist who calls himself “08–n7R6-7984” probably has too many projects on the go. The one that has caught the most attention is RE5734L3R, which follows a robot that makes its way up the class system of a mechanical cyberpunk city by stealing the social chips of other robots. It’s the pixe
Nick Preston decided to call his upcoming series of short adventure games Toryansé after the Japanese folk song of the same name. The song is traditionally sung as part of a children’s game—Warabe uta, which is very similar to the English nursery rhyme game Oranges and Lemons—but has surprisingly da
